The impact of the expanding contribution of teaching assistants on the teacher's role is generally recognised as being positive. It is worth acknowledging, however, that many teachers have had to make adjustments to their practice in order to work with teaching assistants as team colleagues. Despite the presence of assistants in primary schools, the focus of much initial teacher training is on teachers working in classrooms on their own rather than as collaborators with other adults. While th

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Hilary Cremin et al. (2003) in their evaluation of the ways in which teachers and teaching assistants can work together in teams, suggest that, while there is enthusiasm for additional support, little attention is given to how this actually works in classrooms. It is true that learning support staff have been introduced into classrooms without clear research evidence that they can make a difference to children's learning, but then life often moves faster than the supply of research evidence.<

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Teaching assistants and other related learning support staff are also to be found in the schools for children of British armed forces posted overseas, in the schools of other European countries and, indeed, further afield in countries such as the USA, Canada and Australia. A survey conducted by the National Union of Teachers (NUT, 1998) highlighted some interesting support roles found in European schools, and it is worthwhile to consider these in the light of the developing role of teaching a

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The physical design of most primary schools certainly reflects the expectation that teachers work in classrooms with large numbers of children. In fact, given their large classes, most schools feel quite crowded. The employment of teaching assistants has doubled the number of adults working in some classrooms and, as Schlapp and Davidson note in the pdf document attached in Author(s):

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Activity 1

Look at an extract from An A to Z of English by clicking on the video clip below. In this extract poet Michael Rosen acts out a confusing lesson on grammar. How many of the questions would you have got right? (Just giAuthor(s): The Open University

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The founder ofTechnorati claims that the number of ‘blogs’ doubles every five months and that the creation rate is approaching two per second. One estimate I read in July 2010 put the number at 400 million ‘blogs’. Because these online diaries offer instant publishing opportunities, you potentially have access to a wealth of knowledge from commentators and experts (if they blog) in a wi

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We mentioned above that we need to reference sources to ensure we abide by copyright legislation. But there is another reason we need to give accurate references to items we use – so we can share it.

Consider this scenario. A friend says they’ve just read an interesting article where Joshua Schachter, founder of Delicious has spoken about why it isn’t a faceted search system, and you should read it. How would you go about finding it? Would you start looking in a news database, a s

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